The need to manage and mitigate risks in documents, including changes made to document versions by internal and external sources, has become an essential component of a number of business specialties involved with documents that may be sensitive in nature, such as those found in the legal, financial, government, and accounting business sectors. Professionals in industries that consistently engage in document sharing and collaboration within and outside of their organizations find document comparison programs essential in ensuring identification of all changes made throughout a document's lifecycle and all sensitive metadata held within their documents.
Multiple users may edit documents in a number of programs making changes to text, tables, images, and other embedded objects such as values, formulas, annotations and other document aspects. Reviewing a document after it has been shared with an external source, whether by humans or by computer programs, becomes necessary to accurately identify changes in the document content.
Conventional document comparison programs, such as Workshare™ Professional or Deltaview, Softinterface® Diff Doc™, DocsCorp compareDocs, and Esquire Innovations iRedline, compare differences between two documents (e.g., word processing documents, spreadsheet documents, presentation documents, etc.), a task formerly reserved solely for humans. These programs identify and ascertain differences in an original (first) and modified (second) document and display those differences in a third document, commonly referred to as a redline document.
These conventional document comparison programs fail to adequately preserve the context of changes in annotations (comments) between original and modified documents. Specifically, the programs fail to clearly present changes in annotations at a granular level. Annotation text is often stored in a different location than the text of the main document. Markers are placed in the document so that the location of the annotation and its text can be determined. But because the annotation text is not part of the main document, many document comparison programs ignore the annotation text or only show changes to this text as a new comment inserted or deleted without showing the actual granular changes. For example, when a change is made to the content of an annotation in an original file, this annotation is shown unchanged and the modification is shown as a whole new insertion of a comment in a modified file. Other document comparison programs insert the text of the annotation into the body of the main document at the location of the annotation marker before performing a comparison. However, this results in a document that is difficult to read.
In either case, the reader loses the context of the changes. Either the entirety of the comment is shown as changed, defeating the purpose of a comparison because a human must still review the two comments to determine what actually changed, or the comment text gets mixed up with the document text, making it difficult to discriminate between the text and the comments. Thus, with current systems the context of the change is lost, limiting the user's ability to quickly decipher contextually relevant changes to the document.